There would undoubtedly be web-site sections or pages with extremely high competition that would stress popularity and importance of that topic, so if you decide to keep it "as is", optimization will raise your listing, but somewhere from 796,021 place to 545,932. Does it help you?

The extent of your "flexibility" and how far you can go to look "pretty" from SE viewpoint is what should be decided beforehand, because there are always 3 parts: you/your business, target market/consumers and search engines/directories, between which about 90% of informational preferences are common, but rest 10% differ and it is up to you to decide what themes you should focus on. Whenever you are implementing any of SEO tactics mentioned in this publication, keep in mind your business and consumers' needs.

Having understood these fundamental features of SEO, could we make a step further into a complete web-site search engine optimization, expanding your business to new markets.

Note that SEO, despite all mentioned above, is all about "asking for high ranking" and there cannot be any results guarantee as no one except for SE developers themselves control ranking algorithm and determine "who is where". More than that, SEO takes much time before effecting your listing positions and this timeframe may range somewhere from week to several months, so don't panic if your optimization efforts haven't resulted in Google #1 position by tomorrow morning.

Structure

Let's start from drawing a scheme of your web-site link structure very similar to one every web-developer draws before designing a web-site. Under other equal conditions, we will speak about later, it is also clear that more theme based web-pages or even web-site sections you create, more chances of being ranked high you have, no matter how optimized your competitor's single web-page is.

Each web-page of web-site section should represent a particular theme or topic. This way you can diversify your "keywords market", increasing chances of high rankings. Despite obvious visitors advantage your site is more likely to win market recognition.

For now try to have "horizontal" as well as standard "vertical" link connections between pages. If one of your pages got a high ranking position (Google Page rank) it may help to improve rankings of web-pages connected to it as well.

Keyword analysis

Next step is to determine keywords, mainly, phrases that we would like to target. Talking about mentioned dilemma, I would like to point to other approach you should know about, that is suggested by some experts. Let's call it SE-oriented approach.

According to this approach, before creating a web-site your first step implies searching for best key phrases via competitive analysis on main SE and then starting to develop content around these keywords. It means that your web-site will get highest SE ranking, but informational richness will be dictated by neither you nor your consumers. Under such conditions it is SE or, to be more specific, your compe tition will determine what kind of content you will have at your web-site. As you see, according to SE-oriented approach, more competitive some key phrase and based on it topic is, less attention you should pay to developing that theme at your own site.

My attitude is slightly different. I offer at first to create and evaluate your current web-site content based on your business preferences and your niche-market needs and then optimize those web-pages according to keywords taken from your existed web-pages, no matter how tough competition may be. Of course, you are free to create new pages around keywords with low competition just for traffic building purposes, but primary accent should be focused on your business development and marketing needs.

As for keywords, basic rule is to choose most targeted phrases rather than single words for two reasons: - Phrases could describe your web-page theme usually more precisely than a word; - Phrases usually have substantially less competition in comparison with one-word.

Write down 3-5 most targeted key phrases for each web-page or section we are going to optimize. Then by evaluating supply/demand ratio find easiest keywords for SE positioning.

Standard procedure of determining your key phrase competition or, as i said "evaluating supply/demand ratio" is to look at their supply and demand at popular SEs. Supply is determined by results of searching them on SEs while demand can be found through query on PPC programs at Overture.com or Google.com's AdWords that have tool for discovering how many time keywords or phrase have been searched on them.

By doing so we are searching for most prospective and promising for optimization key phrases. Having them allow us to go further and start optimizing web-pages themselves.

(to be continued)

To be short, your task is to find web-sites that have highest SE listing positions and/or page rank (determined via Google Toolbar) and negotiate a link to your site in return for some service, product or solicit simple exchange of links. As you see these "manual" work is most time-consuming, but it repays if you are focused to get as much relevant links as possible.

You may apply viral strategies by offering some free/paid service that implies putting a link back to your site.

Google has developed its own link popularity evaluation tool called Page Rank. It is calculated basing on consistently changing number rules: current rank of site link to your page is pointing from, its relevance to your web-site topic, presence of targeted words etc.

Fake tactics

They are what I call them and used by webmasters similar to ways some "marketers" use spam to promote their businesses.

Unfortunately, usual internet users don't have ability to "ban" spammers same way SEs penalize those "smart" webmasters. I don't recommend you to use any of these tactics, even on someone's "advice".

They include excessive use of related and totally unrelated keywords, comment tags, hidden layers, text on background of same color, artificial link farms, numerous entry pages etc. This game simply won't be worth candles if your web-site is banned for good.

robots.txt file

Very important file every web-site should have. It allows you to literally rule or direct SE spider to "proper" places, explaining what and where should be scanned, not just blind waiting of your lucky day. With its help you can also protect your confidential web-pages and or directories from scanning and showing at SE searching results, very important feature many web-masters solve with "tons" of Java or even Perl coding instead of one line string in robots.txt file that will forbid to scan "download", so-called "thank you" pages or anything you want!

General rules of creating robots.txt file you can find here http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Design & Layout issues

Next point is to have a textual info. The simple declaration of content rich web-site is not enough, SEs need text to scan.

Clear to follow links. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well. Most SE spiders cannot distinguish dynamically created web-pages with help of ASP, Perl, PHP or other languages. It is also clear that all web-pages, access to which was forbidden (no matter how) by administrator, would also be left unnoticed. The same relates to HTML frame sites. What frames actually do is complicate way web-site is being scanned, no more, no less. When I see web-site made of frames, it is like webmaster telling me: "I want lower SE position."

Because of excessive work spiders have to do in order to scan as many pages as possible, their scanning "accuracy", if we can say so, have dropped, so they will hardly scan each and every of your pages from very top to bottom, it is more likely to be selective scanning, so, to ease this process you should try to arrange most valuable info, including header tags and text at very top of web-pages. Having "site map" page with all link connections of your site not only does it help your potential visitors, but SEs as well.

All link names, inside your informational content, are to contain your related keywords or phrases, not just "click here" or "download here".

Avoid a lot of javascripts, cascade style sheet tags or a lot of image tags at top of page that could occupy more than a page of HTML source code with almost no textual info. If you have java or .css coding save them as separate files and upload on request, leaving one string of code in your HTML document only. This tactic is also very smart considering general web-page optimization and space saving purposes.

Allow to Internet market know your business better.